Tape drives have been widely employed in industry for over thirty years due to their ability to store large amounts of data on a relatively small, inexpensive removable format. The data is stored on tape drives utilizing a variety of designs, but in all cases, magnetic tape media is wound between a pair of tape reels as data is transferred to or from the tape media. The standard tape media employed in many applications is a one half-inch wide tape media housed in a tape cartridge measuring at or near 1 inch in height. The most common form factor for tape drives measures 8 inch×5.75 inch×3.25 inch in width, length and height respectively. Therefore, typical half-inch tape drives occupy two drive bays when installed in a conventional computer housing.
In the art of data storage, the physical space required to store data is an important concern. Thus, it is desirable to have a half-inch tape drive that is constructed with a half-height form factor that can be installed in a single drive bay in a conventional computer housing. The form factor of the half-high tape drive measures the same as the full high form factor in width and length. However, the height is ½ of the full high size, namely 1.625 inch. Due to this height limitation, the majority of the sub-assemblies must be changed from their full high version to accommodate the substantial height reduction.
For example, the conventional head flexible printed circuit routing is unmanageable in a half-high form factor configuration, due to the space limitations. Two separate loops are conventionally provided, one for the coarse actuator and one for the fine actuator, making up the head actuator. Because of the space limitations, it is difficult to provide two separate loops. In addition, the head flexible printed circuits are routed to a printed circuit board that is located at the bottom side of the tape drive.
Prior systems which describe damping use relatively large devices, such as bulky linear tachometers. Half-high drives do not have the space available for such large devices. Furthermore, in addition to the increase in mass and height, the linear tachometer devices described in the prior art use additional wiring to connect to a printed circuit board.